Thursday, April 7, 2011

We’ve just released XAP 8.0.1, with a lot of goodies included. 8.0.1 is the first feature and service pack on top of XAP 8.0.0. It includes many enhancements and a few exciting new features. Here’s a short recap:

Improved Web UI Dashboard with Alerts View: The dashboard view now gives you a single click view of the entire cluster, including alerts on various problematic conditions. The previous view is now available under the topology tab. This is the first stage in the new Web based UI planned for XAP. You can find more details about it here.

Elastic Deployment for Stateless and Web Processing Units: The elastic deployment model introduced in 8.0 for stateful and data grid only processing units has now been extended to support stateless and web processing units. You can scale web applications and stateless processing units up and down based on CPU, memory or available resources.

Document (Schema-Free) API support for .Net: The .Net edition now includes the all new document API which was introduced in the 8.0.0 in the Java version. It enables you to maintain a completely flexible domain model without any restrictions on the entry's schema, and add/remove properties as your application evolves. It also simplifies interoperability with Java since when using the Document API it's no longer tied to a concrete .Net and Java classes.

Improved complex object querying and indexing for .Net: The .Net edition now enables you to query and index complex object structures, including nested collections and arrays.

Deep POJO/PONO - Document Interoperability: Documents and POJOs can now be mixed interchangeably across all nesting level. You can read a document as a POJO/PONO (assuming its type name corresponds to the POJO/PONO class name) and vice versa. The space will convert between the formats across all nesting levels, so if you have a complex Java object for example which contains a reference to a nested Java Object or a collection of nested objects, the space will convert the entire object graph to documents and sub documents. In addition, you can also define a "bag" of dynamic properties for a certain POJO/PONO so that new properties that are added via the document API to the entry are exposed in the POJO/PONO instance via this bag.

Map/Reduce and Native Query Support for JPA: The XAP JPA Implementation now supports the JPA NativeQuery facility. On top of running queries in the Space's native syntax, it also enables you to actually execute Space tasks across one or all cluster nodes and bring the power of the grid to the JPA API. Tasks can be defined using the GigaSpaces task execution interfaces or even as a dynamic language script for scripting languages that are supported as part of the JVM.

Method Level routing and result reducers for Space Based Remoting: Space Based Remoting has traditionally been a very popular facility to reliably expose scalable business services to your application clients. In 8.0.1, you can specify method level behaviors for the foundational remoting constructs such as RemoteRoutingHandlers and RemoteResultReducers via the dedicated @ExecutorRemotingMethod and @EventDrivenRemotingMethod annotations.

WAN Replication Improvements: 8.0.1 adds a number of important improvements and bug fixes to the replication over WAN module, such as better peer classloading behavior (when the classes written to the space are not part of the space's classpath), better cleanup of replicated entries, and support for replication of .Net entries.

Improved Performance of .Net Executor API: The .Net task execution API has gone some optimization in the way that tasks are passed to the space and executed in it, which resulted in performance boosts of up to 250%.

More JPA goodies: In addition to NativeQuery support, we have also implemented a number of other changes, including better JPQL syntax support (LIKE, IS NULL), optimistic locking support and improved relationship handling.

Improved XA Transaction Support: XA transactions can now work against a partitioned space cluster as a single XA resource (via the distributed Jini transaction manager) rather than working with each partition separately.

Mule 3.1 Support: The build in Mule ESB support has been ungraded to support Mule version 3.1.

About Me

I work for GigaSpaces Technologies and have been implementing and architecting enterprise Java projects for the past 10 years or so.
Currently I run the product management at GigaSpaces, and blog mostly about scalability and distributed computing in the context of the problems we run into and try to solve in GigaSpaces.